TRANSLATIONAL AND CLINICAL RESEARCH Efficient Generation of Functional Dopaminergic Neurons from Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Under Defined Conditions

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) reprog-rammed from somatic cells represent a promising unlim-ited cell source for generating patient-specific cells for biomedical research and personalized medicine. As a first step, critical to clinical applications, we attempted to de-velop defined culture conditions to expand and differenti-ate human iPSCs into functional progeny such as dopaminergic neurons for treating or modeling Parkin-son’s disease (PD). We used a completely defined (xeno-free) system that we previously developed for efficient gen-eration of authentic dopaminergic neurons from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), and applied it to iPSCs. First, we adapted two human iPSC lines derived from dif-ferent somatic cell types for the defined expansion mediu